Did you know? Every day, Americans send 50 million dirty diapers to landfills.  That’s right, 50 million every day.  That’s approximately 20 Billion each year!  Guess how many years it takes for each one of those 20 Billion turd receptacles to decompose? <answer at bottom of post>

Check out the following video which comes to us from gDiapers, which makes eco-friendly plastic-free baby diapers (no adult versions that I could find LOLZ).  Basically, it shows 3 different types of diapers decomposing over the course of one year.  The results: truly eye-opening!

Environ|Mental is a series of posts regarding changing your mentality about the environment.

Adjust your environmentality!

What?  Don’t recycle plastic?  A website promoting greener living telling you not to recycle?

Kind of…  but not really.  Read on!

Actually, I’m telling you to think about not even needing to recycle plastic — that is, when possible, avoid using plastic altogether.

Don’t let plastic into your life!

Plastic is difficult and costly to recycle, it degrades each time that it is recycled, and it takes many lifetimes to break down. So, when you can, stop using it! Just cut it out of your life!  Use metal, use wood, don’t use it at all!  Don’t buy that gadget.  Don’t pull that plastic bag off the roll.  Give

Product Reviewed: Soap Nuts

Place of Purchase: BuySoapNuts.com

Purchase Price: $40/ 1 kg OR $22 for 500 g OR test them out for a penny plus shipping!

Product replaced: Long ago, I had used Purex…  I switched to using a series of different more ecological options such as Seventh Generation Powder. 

Ingredients: Nuts from the sapindus mukorossi tree.

Use: I was sent both whole nuts, which you place into a small cloth bag and powdered nuts, which you seep in hot water to extract detergent.  I used both of these in place of typical laundry detergent.  If you check out buysoapnuts.com, and read about it on wikipedia, you can find that there are many more uses!

Results: I first tried the soap nuts in

In my endless browsing of the internet, tonight I came across one of the coolest things I’ve seen in quite a while. It comes to us from our friends(?) at General Electric. You’ve probably seen their ads on TV over the past year or so pushing the Ecomagination campaign, which are pretty slick.

Now I’ll leave the debate open for another future post on whether or not GE really is pushing forward with greener energy options, but in the meantime check out Plug Into the Smart Grid, where you can use your webcam to create an incredibly cool holographic image on the screen. I just hope GE is putting as much energy into greening themselves as they are making cool internet tricks!

For a quick preview, check out the YouTube clip below! By the way, I tried it and it really does work just like the video!

How will regulating carbon dioxide affect the cost of burning fossil fuels?

The New York Times reports that the Obama Administration’s EPA is expected to begin regulating carbon dioxide as a pollutant.

The story begins:

WASHINGTON — The Environmental Protection Agency is expected to act for the first time to regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that scientists blame for the warming of the planet, according to top Obama administration officials.

The story also stated that the change could have far-reaching implications

Last Saturday morning, I awoke early to make my way to North Avenue Beach in Chicago.  I was not there to play volleyball.  I was not there to fail at volleyball, either (I once was working on overhand serving and managed to hit my ball directly at the head of a guy putting a net up next to ours.  Three times in a row!).

I also was not there to stare at a crush of mine, although that happened.  I had no idea she was joining in the fun until I arrived.  Bonus!

I went to the beach, actually, to participate in a beach cleanup effort, organized by the Alliance for the Great Lakes.  I am not a janitor by trade and typically I would not have found picking up garbage out of sand and seaweed a great fun, but my increasing awareness of the hazards posed by water- and land-borne litter made this a fun activity.  The giant omelet and apple pancake afterward helped, too!  Plus the presence of a crush.

Chalk one up for the environment!

From the New York Times’ Jim Robbins:

HELENA, Mont. — A federal judge ruled Monday that the Bush administration’s plan to allow more than 500 snowmobiles a day into Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks was not in keeping with the National Park Service’s responsibility to protect the parks.

The judge, Emmet G. Sullivan of Federal District Court in Washington, said park planners had failed to reconcile their mission to protect the parks’ environment with the increase in air pollution, the disturbance to wildlife and the impact on visitors that the snowmobiles would bring.

“The plan clearly elevates use over conservation of park resources and values,” Judge Sullivan wrote in his 63-page ruling.

Read more!

Commentary:

Here, the commonsense approach a judge took comparing the stated mission of the national parks to the purpose officials in the Bush Administration were wanting to do

We often write, “EHI Quick Tips,” which outline simple, easy steps you can take to green your daily life.  The writers of EnviroHumanImpact believe that this is a great approach to those just begining to look at a more environmentally-friendly lifestyle.  Once you have introduced a few greener buying options or changes to daily life, it can become difficult to stop yourself from adopting even more practices that will improve your envirohuman impact!

Here, we have compiled a short list of some of the easy, yet effective changes you can begin using in your daily life, right away!

1. EHI Quick Tip: Unclog that Shower Drain
2. EHI Quick Tip: Get a Watering Can
3. EHI Quick Tip: Ditch those Paper Statements
4. EHI Quick Tip: Buy a Tea Kettle
5. EHI Quick Tip: Ride the Elevators Less at Work

You might notice a common pattern here: most of our quick tips are easy and focus on reducing our energy, water, or other resource usage.  What ideas do you have for improving one’s envirohuman impact?

If you’re trying to follow the envirohuman movement, you should definitely pick up these news stories:

Pickens’ Plan to Profit Off of Public Water

I did not know that Pickens’ plan, which includes a large project of transmission lines to move electricity generated from wind power from rural areas to urban ones, seems to double as a way to move water from what arguably should be considered a public resource.  The water, from a vast underground reservoir, would use the same transmission pathway as the electricity.  Seems we should be careful of what we wish for; even though so many environmentalists, capitalists, and government officials all seem to be in favor of this plan, is it fair for an individual or company to take so much of what belong to the public an make such huge profits off of it?  The same could be asked of oil companies drilling for and profiting off of oil under public lands.

Bloomberg Skyscraper Windmill Plan

I had always wondered about the high altitude created by, among other surfaces, skyscrapers, as points of interest for wind turbines.  Obviously, in the middle of a city, the power generated has more than enough available users, but also, cities have huge overall electricity needs, but relatively little open spaces to put windmills.  Or, do they?  It seems this may be a viable plan for reducing the need for fossil fuel-burning power plants for cities and the transmission lines it might take to move power from open plains into urban areas.

Sunken Ship as Habitat

This is a very interesting concept for me, because while yes, much of this ship is made up of recyclable metals, it also includes some plastics that have concerned scientists familiar with the project for the negative effects of introducing chemicals associated with such plastics into the food chain.  This reminds me of a project that the New York Times detailed months ago, regarding the sinking of spent subway cars into harbors, also for the purpose of becoming marine habitat.  Again in that case, there was concern over the asbestos used in the subway cars, and how it escaping into the ocean might have a negative effect.  Still, the sunken vessel and the subway cars have made for great marine habitat.